Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? Do you feel like a fraud, wondering what sort of voodoo you’ve unwittingly conjured up to make people think you know what what you’re doing, when the reality is quite the contrary?
I sit here now on my 40th birthday almost right to the very moment (12:15pm). I am so lucky to have had so many people in my life. In good times and bad times, but they were all times shared. And this is my birthday wish for everyone I have had the honor and privilege of knowing up to this point; I hope that your life can be filled with the joy and love that it has been my privilege to experience and share with each and every one of you.
We all have thoughts of “what if” I could go back and change the past … Well I have thought about it a lot, and I wouldn’t change a single moment, Because they were times spent with each and every one of you. I love you all and hope that you have as wonderful a journey as I have had up to this point. Thank you all, I am eternally grateful.
And to those that have not made the journey this far; to my friends long gone but never forgotten, I still think of you and you will always be with me. To Denise Dietrich and Andrea Atchley: I miss you very much and wish you were here today to share this with me.
Clearbox3 AJAX Tool
OLD VERSION
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself
MODERN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving…
CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green.’
Acorn stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing, ‘We shall overcome.’
Rev. Jeremiah Wright then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake.
Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.
Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ants food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it..
The ant has disappeared in the snow.
The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote!
If you think you are not at risk, if you think that these are the things that happen to others only, consider the Christian minister Niemoller, whose admonition during those dark years of Nazi Germany moved us when he exclaimed:
“When they came for the gypsies, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a gypsy. When they came for the homosexuals, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a homosexual. When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I said nothing, because I wasn’t a Catholic……then they came for me, and there was no one left to defend me.”
Thank you Kim for the Grasshopper story.
The Talmud in Megilla[1] (the biblical narrative of the Book of Esther) makes a very interesting point. “As the Egyptians were drowning in the sea, the ministering angels wished to utter song before the Holy One, but He rebuked them, saying, ‘The works of My hands are drowning in the sea, and you would utter song in My presence!’”[2]
Certainly, it was necessary for the Egyptians to die, for if they had not, they would have slaughtered the Israelites, but God told the angels, “You may not sing.” They — the Israelites — can sing. They were the ones who were enslaved, they were the ones who were beaten, they saw their infants murdered, and they suffered at the hands of those very Egyptians. But you may not sing — the death of any of My creatures is not an occasion for rejoicing.
There are times when there is no choice but to fight and to kill our enemies. As the Talmud puts it quite succinctly — if someone is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first. However, it should never be done gleefully. Later, in Devarim, the Torah commands, “When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace.” War is a last resort, when there is no alternative, when enemies refuse to make peace. Still, it is always sad, even when it is necessary.
All human beings are God’s creatures — even if they choose not to behave as if they are. Every human being was once loved by his or her mother. War and killing may be necessary, but they are not sources of happiness — even for the victors. In the words of Israel’s most quotable Prime Minister, Golda Meir, “The only thing I cannot forgive the Arabs for is that they forced our sons to kill their sons.”[3]
As is says in Proverbs, “If your enemy falls, do not exult; if he trips, let your heart not rejoice, lest the Lord see it and be displeased.”
So you see, we really do have a reason to make the world a better place. There is a plan and a purpose and there is a way. 143.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megillah_(Talmud)
2. http://www.torahleadership.org/categories/beshalach.pdf p.4
3. 1969 press conference in London – http://www.mscd.edu/golda/golda/quotes.shtml
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
Marcus Tullius Cicero (pronounced /ˈsɪsɨroʊ/; Classical Latin: [ˈkikeroː]; January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists.
Source: Attributed. 58 BC, Speech in the Roman Senate
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
Source: Attributed. 55 BC
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
Cicero’s Six Mistakes of Man.
http://www.marketingprofs.com/9/emerging-consumer-values-why-brands-must-adjust-ratushny.asp
http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9298/1/internet-marketing-trends.htm
In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we’re talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.
Many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America’s entry into World War II. But at least the United States never ended up becoming a fascist dictatorship (unless you ask Ron Paul supporters).
I am exploring a new way of managing the work I do for my various clients. In fact I consider this to be a completely new product having it’s own value proposition with a large list of benefits and features. This post is intended to give you a preview of the new process and introduce you to what I call Object Oriented Business.
Occam’s Razor
First of all let me explain the name. Occam’s Razor is apocryphally attributed to 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham and relates directly to the law of parsimony. That is to say it is a sophisticated and intellectual way of saying “Keep it simple stupid.” The principle is often expressed in Latin as “ntia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” which roughly translates “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
In business this is my philosophy, culture and ethos. Everything I do is done in a simple straightforward manner searching for brevity and correctness in every process and undertaking. I have even gone so far as to turn down clients because of their lack of belief in this principle of simplicity. I have also as of yet not found anyone that can prove to me that a more complex system or solution is better than the straightforward simple one. Simplicity saves time and money, and in the end the key to any business is “THE BOTTOM LINE.”
Object Oriented Business
The Object Oriented Business model I use for development and process improvement employs a organizational process that very closely emulates the structure of Object Oriented Programing in the IT world. It is my hope to soon have a clearer explanation of this in the OCCAM section of this website. I will of course be posting an update to let everyone know when this has been completed so in the mean time, your patience is truly appreciated!
Today, I found a great article on maintaining your online social presence.
Maintaining your online presence takes time. If you look at all I’ve listed above, that’s easily more than an hour of work. But it depends what the value of that presence is to you, if you’re doing this as an individual, or to your organization, if you’re doing this on behalf of a brand or product.
We’ve traded dollars for time, in lots of these equations, as we see the return on our advertising spend diminish. It’s your choice whether you want to maintain an active online presence, or if you want to get away with a bit less.
What do you think?
Original Article: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/19-presence-management-chores-you-could-do-every-day/
